Commemorative Print Process / Black Swan - Serie Project

[vrooooom]

I thought I'd share some process sets from an edition we ran this past week.

Here in Houston, there's an exhibit currently up that highlights a lot of the Serie Project's work from the past 18 years. If you don't know it, the Serie Project is an artist residency program that pairs up 1 artist with 1 master printer to create a set of 50 screen prints in a week's time. No cost to the artist, and at the end they split the edition between both parties. Yeah, it's pretty cool, and their internships have set off a lot of printers' careers, including mine.

Well, myself and a local artist named Dual set up to commemorate the event with an edition of prints. Another thing about the Serie Project is that it was founded in the tradition of Chicano printmaking, which sprang up alongside the political / social movement of the same name. The exhibit here in Houston is also an introduction between Serie and MECA, which is a 30 year old latino community nonprofit.

So, we decided to take a lot of imagery from those Loteria card games, putting in a dose of sign-writing and line art from the standard loteria deck.... el barril, el nopal, la luna, el diablito, etc.

Since a lot of the Serie Project's prints are made from hand-painted acetates/mylars, we wanted to get that feel a bit while still throwing the layers together digitally. One of my favorite things recently has been to compose textures / art on smaller card stock with ink, and then scan in at 1200-2400 dpi in order to enlarge to final size. This really speeds up the process (as compared to painting a full size, 22x30 acetate) while keeping the look of the print "hand-made." We did this with 6 different textures, and overlaid each screen's design on top of one another, to keep a rough edge throughout.

Here are some shots from the finished print:

[caribou]

nice

[halfmassive]

very cool.

[slakow]

Especialy first two colours (green and orange) looks perfect to me.

[exxxlonghair]

killer

[vrooooom]

yeah, I'm actually thinking about doing a version of just that....